In E-cigarettes and the Comparative Politics of Harm Reduction: History, Evidence and Policy, Virginia Berridge, Ronald Bayer, Amy L. Fairchild and Wayne Hall scrutinise the history underlying the current debate over electronic cigarettes. Exploring th…
Category: Evidence for Policy
Knowledge brokering organisations – what are they and what do they do?
Knowledge Brokering Organisations (KBOs) play an important role in the interface between research and policy. Drawing on a study of comparable international organisations, Eleanor MacKillop, James Downe and Hannah Durrant outline how they perceive thei…
We are in a period of science policy innovation, yet there are major evidence gaps in evaluating their effectiveness
Considering a series of proposed policy changes by the National Institutes of Health, Micah Altman and Philip N. Cohen, argue they highlight wider systematic gaps in the evaluation of operational science policies and signal an urgent need to increase f…
Book Review: How to Engage Policy Makers with Your Research: The Art of Informing and Impacting Policy edited by Syahirah Abdul Rahman et al.
In How to Engage Policy Makers with Your Research: The Art of Informing and Impacting Policy, editors Syahirah Abdul Rahman, Lauren Tuckerman, Tim Vorley and Phil Wallace compile advice from a varied range of contributors on how academics can achieve r…
Reconnecting community, research and policy through post-Covid recovery
In the aftermath of COVID-19, the Falkland Islands Government has taken concrete steps to tackle long-standing inequalities, prompted by evidence of the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on local communities. How was the evidence-policy gap bridged in th…
After ten years of UK What Works Centres, what should their future be?
A decade on from the foundation of the What Works Network, an initiative designed to improve the use of social scientific evidence in the design and delivery of public services in the UK. Michael Sanders and Jonathan Breckon discuss their effectiveness…
A new science of wellbeing will change policy and decision making
What produces a happy society and a happy life? Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve suggest that through the new science of wellbeing, we can now answer this question empirically. Explaining how wellbeing can be measured, what causes it, and how it…
Three Reasons we should place a higher value on Meta-Research
Research is often reported on and assessed in singular, rather than aggregate terms. For example, single papers, datasets and findings. As a debate around the way research syntheses are valued within national research systems, such as the REF, continue…
What are social structural explanations?
Social structures are often invoked as the cause of various problems in society. In this post, Lauren N. Ross discusses how social structural causes can be understood as constraints and why clarity on this point is not just a problem of definition, but…
Researchers engaging with policy should take into account policymakers’ varied perceptions of evidence
There is often an assumption in evidence based policy, that evidence means the findings of quantitative studies or randomised control trials. However, in practice evidence is often understood differently. Drawing on a study of Welsh policy actors, Elea…